Comment by vendiddy
2 years ago
I'm in a different generation as well. What was special about hypercard?
I do remember VB and Macromedia tools and feel like today's tools are harder to use!
2 years ago
I'm in a different generation as well. What was special about hypercard?
I do remember VB and Macromedia tools and feel like today's tools are harder to use!
In a nutshell: HyperCard democratised software development, making it available and accessible to the masses, for free.
In fact, many users were not even aware they were developing software. That's how easy and accessible it was.
Early web browsers, like NCSA Mosaic, enabled people to change the page - you could edit and publish HTML right there in the same tool that you were using to view it! That was the closest we got, and it was taken away from us.
HyperCard was what made me fall in love with computers and programming.
My specific "moment" was when I was a kid (probably 11 or 12 at the time) and went to see a presentation by a science professor about his work (my mom worked at the university, so I kinda had to go to this particular talk, because, well, she was my ride home)... It's hard to imagine, but presentation software like PowerPoint back then was in its infancy. Using computers to do presentations was a new thing (vs using slides developed on film or overhead projectors).
So to make his presentation, the professor created a HyperCard deck of all the slides he wanted to present. And, more importantly, he had to create little forward and back buttons on each slide to go forward or back in the presentation (again, he basically was creating a version of PowerPoint in that moment)...
But that's not what got my attention... Halfway through the presentation, one of the buttons on screen didn't work. He apologized, quickly switched to code edit mode, fixed the bug by adding a line of code, then went back to normal mode and continued his presentation. I can't remember anything else that happened other than being completely dumbfounded that you could change/edit a program's code like that while using the same software.
After that, I was hooked. I immediately got a book on HyperCard and learned how to recreate the miracle I saw in that presentation.
Long story long, HyperCard was PowerPoint or Keynote before slide deck software existed. And it blew my mind and launched my interest in a software career.
https://youtu.be/FzbHYl17x6U?si=0EbyyYdqeyU5f5qb&t=312
This Computer Chronicles episode from 1990 should help explain it.
They did a number of episodes on it. Here's one with laserdiscs https://youtu.be/v9o5Ld8hpug?si=hBaB8MHBdMOKQsUE&t=979
I recommend binge watching old computer chronicles episodes if you're interested in startups and how software gets built, thrives and dies. If this is genuinely new to you, the guy with the beard created the CP/M operating system and had a tragic early death https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall . The other guy is still around but seems to have fallen off posting online in the last few years. (https://twitter.com/cheifet/status/1642364464564510720 last update)
Here are the episodes chronologically https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles?sort=date